3 Aug 2012

ASUS ROG Day 1 summary

So the first group stage is over and we saw a lot of fantastic games.
There were also some surprises with regards to the results.

What was certainly no surprise was that all 7 of the Koreans at the event managed to qualify for the next group stage and 5 of them even finished first in their group.
Of the Koreans The Starcraft Stalker was most impressed by Taeja and The STC.

Fellow Koreans following MC and ForGGs games:

Taejas series against IdrA was also surprisingly tense, and it was nice to watch it over IdrAs shoulders. And although IdrA didn't win, he still managed to qualify for the next stage, with two 3-0s against Protosser. This leads us to the matter of how well the EG team performed.

Generally EG has been under a lot of pressure lately because of a lack of good results. 5 players from the EG team participated in the ASUS ROG so once again there was a lot of pressure.
Of the 5 players, PuMa, DeMusliM, IdrA and Suppy managed to qualify for stage 2. Suppy even finished first in his group and showed very impressive play in both his series.
So all in all EG certainly didn't disappoint during the first group stage and it will be exciting to follow their players further on in the tournament.

DeMusliM getting a hand and arm massage after his games. The massage was sponsored by twitch.tv and is available to all the players:

In group 6 MaNa created a new rivalry against Satiini as they played two exciting PvT series against each other for a spot in the next group stage. In the final series MaNa was the best player and he will move on and get a chance to test his skills against NightEnD who played extremely well in his games, especially against PuMa.

Unfortunately BabyKnight lost both his games and will not move on. But he was in a hard group and we are sure he will get a chance to prove himself in another big tournament soon. We talked to FXOpens manager who said they were very happy with having BabyKnight on their team, and that they were planning on sending him to as many tournaments as possible.

Generally we are looking forward to the games of IdrA and Kas.
IdrA hasn't achieved any really good results in a long time so it would be fun to see him do well here. Kas is just a really good player who btw was insanely tired yesterday because of cancelled and delayed flights and so forth, so it was really cool that he still did so well.

Finally we hope that SortOf can continue his fine play and secure a spot among the final 8 players.